Dreams are true, says 'dreamologist'

Metaphysics school offers weekend of dream interpretation

Laurel Clark in the Peace Dome on the College of Metaphysics campus in Windyville, MO, which is the World Headquarters of the School of Metaphysics. (Paul Madar, Handout)

After Laurel Clark's husband died nearly 12 years ago, she had three "profound" dreams about him.

"It wasn't theoretical whether he was actually there," she said. "I could feel his presence. I knew he was there."

Clark recognizes that some people might believe that this type of dream is simply a person's subconscious filling a void. But as a dream interpreter who has doctorates in divinity and metaphysics, she believes dreams possess much deeper meaning, can reveal loads about a person's waking life and tap into spiritual realms we don't fully understand.

Clark is president of the School of Metaphysics, which next weekend is hosting its 24th annual National Dream Hotline. From 6 p.m. Friday through midnight Sunday, dream interpreters will be available at a hotline (417-345-8411) to interpret dreams or answer questions about them.

The nonprofit school, headquartered in Missouri, has 16 satellite offices in the Midwest, including in Chicago, Palatine and Bolingbrook, where "dreamologists" will offer on-site interpretations. The school also is launching a dream app, a version of which is free.

Clark, 55, understands that some people view dream interpretation with a healthy dose of skepticism, the same reserved for psychics, astrologers and even magicians.

Some folk, like me, even think of dreams as simply REM-sleep entertainment — or fodder for dramas such as the blockbuster movie "Inception" or the new NBC television show"Awake."

But Clark said the act of interpreting dreams goes back to ancient cultures and in some cultures remains a part of everyday life.

"The Senoi people (in Malaysia) built their whole culture around dreams," she said. "Aborigines talk about dreamtime, (the connection between) what people experience when awake and asleep and sometime how one impinges on the other.

"In Western cultures, there are stories in the Bible about pharaohs who had dream interpreters who gave them advice."

And we can't forget about psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud, who was one of the first people to use dreams as a window to the mind and personality, and Carl Jung, one of the first to discuss the connection between dreams and universally understood archetypes.

Clark said the mission of the School of Metaphysics, which began in 1973, is self-development. Some people attend the school to become teachers, while others seek their own self-improvement — which is how Clark arrived there as a student in 1979.

She said that although individual dreams are about the person, there are symbols that are universal. For example, she said, a car in a dream represents the physical body. A hill represents a challenge.

"Say you were driving up a hill and ran out of gas," she said. "That says there's a challenge or obstacle you're trying to deal with and you're running out of energy. You'd have to ask yourself: What is the challenge in my waking life and what's wearing me out?"

But how does the car come to represent the body and the hill become the stand-in for an obstacle? Who decides such things?

Clark said people who study dreams begin to see patterns and make connections between things in the physical and dream worlds and how they relate to the self and the soul.

"After years and years of talking to people about their dreams," she said, "you come to realize, for example, that when one dreams about a house — and this is across cultures, so it doesn't matter whether it's a tepee or an igloo or a hut — it symbolizes the mind."

She said dreams about falling might mean a person is becoming more grounded or needs to become more grounded. Flying dreams represent a feeling of freedom, and children tend to have those more than adults, who often begin to feel more restricted as they age. Dreams about being chased may have something to do with avoidance.

And that dream in which you're about to take a final exam in a class you haven't attended all semester but need for graduation? She said that dream may mean there's a lesson in life that the dreamer isn't learning.

"I've had people who have had recurring dreams or nightmares that have stopped once they have learned or faced something in their waking life," she said.

Most dreams about death are about change, she said. But "visitation dreams," such as the ones about her late husband, are different.

"They sometimes mean you're visited by the spirit of the person who's died," she said. "It's not just a memory of someone who's died. Sometimes they're there to radiate love. Sometimes they're communicating a message."

She said the process of studying dreams and doing dream exercises teaches the difference between a direct perception and something that's the function of the imagination.

"I didn't have my first dream about my husband until a month after he died," she said. "I was at a graduation ceremony, and he was on a stage far away from me. At the end of the ceremony, someone handed me my Bible and a piece of paper fluttered out and it had hearts on it. In the dream I knew it was his handwriting.

"People who have visitation dreams have a definite sense that they're being comforted and it isn't just their imagination."